buddhist blog on writing, photography, teaching, life - with the aim to open inside spaces.

Thursday, March 26, 2015

The White Expanse

This piece blew us all away in class.

It's very tricky to lean into a full-on metaphorical image like this. Though Tod said it happened without his thinking about it, and without planning, his practice has allowed him to stay very close to surprising connections. He says he didn't even realize it was him until teh part about "the other members of his writing group."

The imposter syndrome - feeling a fraud is well-depicted here. Also, the more nuanced but super tricky feeling that anything we do well must be cheating, not worth reading. If the writing comes easily, if, for instance, we build fictional worlds easily with barely any effort, then that must be bad writing, or we are just tricking everyone into thinking we are a good writer.

How to overcome this? Practice. Regular and compassionate. Consistent. And companionship.

Tod's writing:

He sprung into the white open expanse of his blank notebook page
as if he was diving into a swimming pool of milk.When he surfaced, breathless, blinking away the liquid
pearls from his eyelashes, he was astonished to find that he’d written an
entire story.

The
story was about a man who wrote stories, but hadn’t always been able to do so
because the stories got stuck on their way out, they spoke in languages the man
didn’t understand, so he didn’t know how to write them down, how to spell them.It was a matter that came before the
actual craft of writing itself, because he had to learn the language the
stories were speaking.

For
a while, he got around this difficulty by writing stories in a made-up language
of his own that was just different enough, just intoned with a flavor of the
exotic, that it passed as a real language among the other members of his
writing group.They believed the
man was on to something, that he had tapped into some important new voice, and
they were happy to listen to his stories even if they weren’t always sure what
he was writing about.

The
man felt a fraud for this, and punished himself for it in odd ways, such as
writing strange and beautiful lines that earned him gasping praise from the
others, when he knew deep within himself that he didn’t deserve it.The man was actually wrong and his
friends were right, but that story took a long time to write itself out in the
man’s notebook.But the man played
along.

Some
mornings the white paper of his notebook had a resistant skin, like the little
vinyl-ish layer on top of a bowl of pudding.He had to poke at it with the tip of his pen and peel it
back to be able to write anything.And then the pudding beneath the skin would be lumpy and yielding, often
unable to sustain the shape of the words and thoughts that were placed upon
it.

Other
days the notebook page would be like a still sea in a fog bank, unable to bear
the weight of even the faintest beginning of a story, which would slip beneath
the surface and disappear, leaving only the faintest ring of ripples to show
that a story had even begun to be dreamed.

And
then, rarely, the page would open up like a great maw, the hungry white mouth
of some hunted leviathan, and swallow the first words of a story along with a
good chunk of the writer’s hand and arm, still clutching its twitching pen.

These
experiences frightened the man, but they didn’t keep him from writing.In a strange way, they fortified him,
for the process of writing became a succession of stories in their own write
[sic] upon which he could reflect.

Sometimes
wild dogs came in motley packs to circle the white pool of his notebook
page.They’d skulk warily along
the spiral binding, sneak closer in the black shadow of the cardboard covers,
and then, one by one, kneel and sip from the milky pool.He’d watch, holding his breath, not
daring to move, as their lithe, hairy forms emerged from the shadows, sipped
and withdrew.And when they were
gone, he’d make little sketches of them where he was supposed to be writing
words, an attempt to capture something of the poignant darkness they carried
with them, and nourished within their bodies with sips of milk.

On
occasion, other animals came to drink from the pool of his open notebook.Large elephantine shapes, slow-moving
and ponderous, appeared.They were
eyeless, earless, but moved with a patient intelligence.They’d step gently onto the page,
testing the waters, then gradually submerge until the vast humps of their backs
disappeared beneath the alabaster surface with but faint ripples.It was a very odd thing, thought the
man, that these large beasts never resurfaced, and he could only marvel at
where they might have gone, these beasts that surrendered themselves to the
white darkness of his blank pages.

Eventually,
the wild dogs approached less furtively, and their thick wooly pelts slimmed to
a softer touch, their eyes lost their fiery gaze and they began to look
directly at the man where he lay hidden, as if they’d known he was there all
the time.Their breaths never lost
the stink of raw meat, of bones cracked for their marrow, but they eventually
let the man reach out and touch them as they passed, as they filed in a line to
the shore of the notebook, and they turned their heads as they sipped and gave
slight nods of assent at the scratchings of his pen.